I recently started a new quiz bowl team at LSU. I'll be at law school there for the next three years. I started coaching a high school team in little New Roads, Louisiana: Catholic High of Pointe Coupee. Hopefully, I'll be able to coach this high school team for the long haul.

I played on the Texas A&M QB team 2001-2005ish under the tutelage of the gentle giant Chris Romero, and on Edmond Memorial High School's team before that. I've been writing for NAQT for several years, and more recently for Questions Unlimited, helping write pyramidal-style questions.

Our team is composed of me, some younger undergraduates, and a few law school buddies that are trying to avoid studying. I don't know if I'm the right material for a team anchor (God help us!), but hopefully we'll be able to put together a decent team. Wish us luck!

We'll be hosting a college tournament October 30 and a high school tournament January 15 both at the LSU Law Center. I'll be announcing these in separate posts. The Alabama team is helping us put on the Oct 30 tournament, and I'd REALLY love to see Ole Miss, Tulane, UL, and all our locals there. Consider this a warm invitation!!

Welcome to the boards, Scott. Did you happen to play for Edmond at the 2001 HSNCT? I was there (playing for Kent City MI), but I cannot remember if I played Edmond and the results page on NAQT's website is a bit incomplete. I definitely played and got destroyed by Edmond at the 2002 HSNCT, but you apparently were graduated by then.

Thanks, Mike! I definitely did play for Edmond at the 2001 HSNCT. I remember all those MI teams being fantastic! I remember playing St. John's and Irmo, but not much else. Oh man, the good old days! Hope to see you around, Mike! Good luck to Minnesota this weekend against those Badgers!

Thanks, George! Thanks for the word on ACF Fall at Alabama. Jake over there has been really good to us, keeping us informed. The tough part is that we're equidistant from ACF Texas and ACF Alabama, haha. decisions, decisions ...

Please, let's not turn this into an ad hominem thread. All of us deserve better than that.

This is me speaking as a moderator: that's not an ad hominem, and we don't support posts that comment on the tone that you'd like other posters to take.

This is me speaking as a quizbowler and forums user: I'm glad to see that you're founding a team, and there are manifold ways for your team to get connected to the high school circuit and for it to get some money to use to go to tournaments that don't involve supporting Chip Beall.

As a quizbowler, I believe we share a common cause, promoting an intellectual culture and dispelling ignorance. We defeat ourselves when we use the same tactics as those who dismiss us as nerdy or irrelevant. As a high school coach, I’ve seen the pain this causes. I believe we can do better than ostracizing Chip Beall or anyone else.

I guess I think that's true in the abstract. What I do believe, though, is that there are far better questions than Questions Unlimited (at least the ones I've seen) available for the high school market. In this sense, I am not recommending "ostracizing" Chip Beall, but rather pushing for a superior product, one that does not have the poor question quality and ethical problems that have marked QU over the years. I admit I am unfamiliar with your particular questions, so perhaps we are working from different definitions of what "pyramidal" is (most of the Chip questions I have seen over the years are not what I would define as pyramidal). I say these things not to attack you, your program, your work, or even Chip Beall, but rather to express the serious reservations that I think myself and many other collegiate quizbowlers have regarding QU.

Cheynem wrote:I say these things not to attack you, your program, your work, or even Chip Beall, but rather to express the serious reservations that I think myself and many other collegiate quizbowlers have regarding QU.

Mike, I really appreciate what you said. For what it's worth, I'd like to vouch for the QU questions that we will be using at the LSU Academic Challenge, because I've written many of them.

I've been a writer for NAQT for several years (not to suggest AT ALL that I'm a paragon of question-writing ability). Mr. Beall asked me this summer if I would write for him. Specifically, he asked if I would write a large number of games in the pyramidal style to be used for this year's QU question series. I agreed, and have been working very hard to get this done, despite being in law school.

I love pyramidal questions, and I believe NAQT has always produced very high quality questions of this style. I think a QU shift towards pyramidal-style questions could benefit the entire quiz bowl community. NAQT has been very successful at broadening its market share over the years, and I think it's at least partially a result of the quality of their questions. Chip's tournaments, however, still reach a number of teams that are otherwise untouched by the broader quiz bowl community (e.g. my own state of Louisiana).

Perhaps Mr. Beall and QU deserve a re-evaluation. I really appreciate your time and thoughts on this matter.

I'm sorry, but there is a dense track record of ethical and question-quality issues with Chip Beall, QU, and the associated product. I hope that you can see why I am not ready to reconsider or reevaluate QU unless I see some solid evidence (ie, in the form of sample questions or probably an entire set), that proves to me that Chip is indeed writing in what the community knows to be the pyramidal style.

Not to tell anyone how to post, but it may lead to a more productive discussion if people who are speaking against Chip Beall and QU linked to some of the many previous posts (on HSQB and elsewhere) documenting QU's track record of plagiarism, favoritism and other ethical disturbances, rather than just saying " IS BAD" and assuming that forum newcomers know what you're talking about in detail.

(I'm not really sure where they all are, or I'd post them myself. There used to be one here, but it's gone now that Geocities is down, and archive.org isn't pulling out anything useful. Even if Scott is perfectly aware of everything that's gone on, it might be useful to start collecting these again for future reference.)

To Scott: Welcome to the boards! I definitely second George's suggestion of trying to make it to ACF Fall in Alabama. There are also tournaments occasionally held in Arkansas, Texas, and parts further north/east.

Atlee Hammaker wrote:To Scott: Welcome to the boards! I definitely second George's suggestion of trying to make it to ACF Fall in Alabama. There are also tournaments occasionally held in Arkansas, Texas, and parts further north/east.

Thanks, Brice! I'm having trouble getting the team together because of the Alabama game, lol, but we'll definitely do our best.

Atlee Hammaker wrote:(I'm not really sure where they all are, or I'd post them myself. There used to be one here, but it's gone now that Geocities is down, and archive.org isn't pulling out anything useful. Even if Scott is perfectly aware of everything that's gone on, it might be useful to start collecting these again for future reference.)

Hey, Scott! Welcome to the boards, and welcome LSU to quizbowl! I'll avoid the Chip topic for now to provide another word of advice.

It looks like you guys are hosting a tournament really soon, which is a good thing for new clubs. If I were founding a new club, though, I'd try to avoid running a college tournament on an IS-set. For one thing, the questions, being the same as those many college players played in high school, don't encourage much curiosity or provide much challenge to players. For another, when competing with regular circuit tournaments (the EFTs, ACF Falls, packet-sub events), the IS set tournaments tend to draw money away from tournaments with big audiences and lots of players. Also, since it's generally frowned upon by lots of teams who attend the college circuit, you might not bring in as many teams as you otherwise would. Is ACF Novice being mirrored in the area close by? (ULL, LSU, maybe Tulane, schools like that could definitely build a field for that if not.) If not, there might not be much to host in October- perhaps delaying until the winter and hosting THUNDER or Penn Bowl is a better approach.

Douglas Graebner, Walt Whitman HS 10, Uchicago 14"... imagination acts upon man as really as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid."-Sir James Frazer,The Golden Bough

If the round is 95% by you, what guarantees are there that the actual product at any given QU tournament would actually look like whatever the sample shows, given that I can't imagine you are writing even half of the QU product?

Charlie Dees, North Kansas City HS '08"I won't say more because I know some of you parse everything I say." - Jeremy Gibbs

"At one TJ tournament the neg prize was the Hampshire College ultimate frisbee team (nude) calender featuring one Evan Silberman. In retrospect that could have been a disaster." - Harry White

Upon reading them, I have to say they're better but still quite bad. Speaking as a student, I'd prefer HSAPQ and NAQT (to a lesser extent) as a question provider; and I would probably boycott any Questions Unlimited tournaments on the basis of their questions and other reasons that people have alluded to.

Last edited by kayli on Sun Oct 10, 2010 4:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Matt Weiner wrote:Hey Scott, I just remembered where I know you from: weren't you my scorekeeper at the 02 HSNCT, and wasn't I one of your lifelines on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire the following year?

That's right, Matt. lol. Well, I can't remember the scorekeeper part, but yes, you were definitely one of my lifelines. Thanks again for that. I had the whole Aggie team together waiting for the phone call. It was pretty awesome. We didn't get the question correct--it was about The Hives--but it was cool that everybody got to be a part of the experience.

Matt Weiner wrote:Hey Scott, I just remembered where I know you from: weren't you my scorekeeper at the 02 HSNCT, and wasn't I one of your lifelines on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire the following year?

That's right, Matt. lol. Well, I can't remember the scorekeeper part, but yes, you were definitely one of my lifelines. Thanks again for that. I had the whole Aggie team together waiting for the phone call. It was pretty awesome. We didn't get the question correct--it was about The Hives--but it was cool that everybody got to be a part of the experience.

Thanks again for volunteering to help me.

you gave some great press for the quiz bowl community...

"I participated in 12 years of 'nerd bowls,'" Smith said. "That was my only preparation for the audition, but I guess it worked."

scottsmith81 wrote:Dang, the new Ole Miss team beat us to the punch, lol.

I recently started a new quiz bowl team at LSU. I'll be at law school there for the next three years. I started coaching a high school team in little New Roads, Louisiana: Catholic High of Pointe Coupee. Hopefully, I'll be able to coach this high school team for the long haul.

I played on the Texas A&M QB team 2001-2005ish under the tutelage of the gentle giant Chris Romero, and on Edmond Memorial High School's team before that. I've been writing for NAQT for several years, and more recently for Questions Unlimited, helping write pyramidal-style questions.

Our team is composed of me, some younger undergraduates, and a few law school buddies that are trying to avoid studying. I don't know if I'm the right material for a team anchor (God help us!), but hopefully we'll be able to put together a decent team. Wish us luck!

We'll be hosting a college tournament October 30 and a high school tournament January 15 both at the LSU Law Center. I'll be announcing these in separate posts. The Alabama team is helping us put on the Oct 30 tournament, and I'd REALLY love to see Ole Miss, Tulane, UL, and all our locals there. Consider this a warm invitation!!

Looking forward to the competition! Thanks for reading.

There are teams who participated in the Louisiana Collegiate Honors Council (LCHC) quiz bowl event a few months ago, and they may be interested in participating in your tournament. I don't believe they are familiar with the mainstream collegiate circuit, so this tournament may be an opportunity for more Louisiana teams to get involved with quiz bowl. Besides ULL (for whom I assume you have contact), other teams in this event were UNO, ULM, Southern-Baton Rouge, and Delgado CC.

I don't have contact info for these teams, but they are affiliated with their schools' respective honors programs. You may want to contact Jake Sundberg at Alabama to see if he has insight into getting contact info for them (because he attended this event).

I know that Southern is a fervent participant in the Honda Campus All Star Challenge, so they would likely be interested in attending your event if their team has been assembled. If you'd like, I can also make calls to see if we can get contacts for some of these Louisiana schools.

mhayes wrote:I know that Southern is a fervent participant in the Honda Campus All Star Challenge, so they would likely be interested in attending your event if their team has been assembled. If you'd like, I can also make calls to see if we can get contacts for some of these Louisiana schools.

Thanks for the help, Matt. I wrote an email earlier today to the address you provided at Southern. Please feel free to make calls, pursue contacts, and spread word of our 10/30 NAQT tournament as much as you like.